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03 Aug 2015 5:22:35am

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To begin with I think that it is fascinating to stare into the crystal ball of scientific discovery and discover how fallible our quest for knowledge can be from time to time. The idea that we can be wrong is by no means anathema to science, but it seems as if some posters here require infallibility in order to feel comforted by what they're hearing.

What a pity it is whenever science is mentioned that an intelligent designer seems to come out of the woodwork. One needs to look no further than the pattern of discovery to realise that at each stage we see causes for things that can be explained by other things. The fact that the ONLY types of explanations science finds are non-transcendent has to count for something. It certainly leads us to expect to find further and better explanations by examining the evidence for physical phenomena in the real universe. There is neither evidence of intelligence at work in these explanations nor dogmatic insistence that anything it discovers represents absolute knowledge. I think the statement about the continent of knowledge having an ever increasing shoreline is probably the appropriate observation. Unlike the religious explanations that the ID mob put up science can be just fun to think about!

For all those who find insecurity in the face of the unknown and seek to interject metaphysical suppositions to ease their qualms I would say you simply misunderstand the situation. Science assumes certainty of nothing. Stephen Jay Gould put it that a fact might be "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." Science then does not pretend to be certain about things that it has no evidence for in the same way that religion does. They differ! It is a difference that should be understood properly at a minimum and celebrated if you are like minded to find it a liberating experience.